Tripling: Playing Dress-Up to Disrupt Identity Politics

Triiibe is a performance collective that originated in 2006 when performance artists and identical triplets, Alicia, Kelly and Sara Casilio joined creative forces with noted documentary photographer, Cary Wolinsky. Together, Triiibe creates political and social commentary through art using performance, video and photography. They explore diverse ideas together and their collective voice allows them to reach a broad audience. The images their exhibitions are carefully constructed observations on identity and the politics of identity. The works ask questions such as: How are we the same? How are we different? What is feminine? What is masculine? What role goes gender play in politics?

In 2009, Triiibe had their first solo exhibition of photographs at Gallery Kayafas. They unveiled a solo exhibition in Boston University’s 11,000-square-foot gallery 808 in the fall of 2010. Their current show at DODGEgallery is Triiibe’s New York debut.

AIG Greed Redux: John Law and the Mississippi Bubble

A national outcry of public outrage has forced the Obama administration to take action on the large bonuses that AIG has given to a group of its executives. The bonuses that AIG has distributed went to the very group of employees whose risky trades brought the company to the brink of collapse. “It’s hard to understand how derivative traders at AIG warranted any bonuses, much less $165 million in extra pay,” Obama said at the outset of an appearance to announce help for small businesses hurt by the deep recession. “How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat,” the president said.

The whole debacle of the greed displayed by AIG, as well as by some large banks that recently received large sums of bailout money from the government, is reminiscent of the simultaneous collapse of both the French trading arm and royal bank in the early 1700s. That collapse has been described as “John Law and the Mississippi Bubble.” John Law was a Scottish economist who believed that money was only a means of exchange that did not constitute wealth in itself and that national wealth depended on trade. During the reign of Louis XIV, John Law set up France’s Banque Générale Privée (“General Private Bank”), which developed the use of paper money. Many have considered Law to be little more than a colorful con man, responsible for the Mississippi Bubble and the chaotic economic collapse in France.

Richard Condie’s 1978 animated short film, John Law and the Mississippi Bubble, offers up a history lesson about that sensational get-rich-quick scheme, which took place in France over 200 years ago. The film won the Best Film Award at the 1980 International Short Film Festival in Tampere, Finland. With economist John Law at the helm, the plan was to open a national French bank and exchange bank notes for gold at wildly inflated share prices to mask the fact that the country’s gold had been depleted in the building of Louis XIV’s palace. In the film, when the inevitable rush to cash in the notes takes place, poor John Law is left broke and broken-hearted.

It was one of the most sensational get-rich-quick schemes heard of in a long time, but it eventually burst over the head of its originator, John Law. This “rags to riches to rags” story, in which the plan was to open a bank and exchange banknotes (paper!) for gold at wildly inflated share prices, ends when John Law, having been cleaned out as a result of a rush to cash in the notes, is left broke and broken-hearted.

A Photo Haiku: Wall Street Battered as Industry Bailouts Fail

Wall Street Has Greatest Decline Since the Great Depression

Yesterday, The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal all led with front page stories about yet another horrible day for stocks that sent one clear message: Investors are freaked out. Another grim milestone was reached yesterday as the broad Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index plunged 6.7 percent and reached its lowest level since 1997. The Congressional bailouts have failed miserably.

The S&P 500 is down 52 percent from its high reached a little more than a year ago, which marks the “sharpest decline since the Great Depression,” noted the LAT. The WSJ pointed out that if the index were to finish the year with yesterday’s numbers, it would mark “the worst annual percentage drop in its 80-year history.” And today’s not looking any better!!

While America’s Corporate CEOs Laugh All the Way to the Bank

Now in Japan, the CEOs of failed and bankrupt banks and corporations take shame very seriously. When Japanese CEOs make mistakes, they’re expected to make a big show of tearily flogging themselves in public (figuratively). But what’s going on here in America? American corporate CEOs get to screw up as bad as they want and walk away with millions, with nary a tear nor even a nice tip to the bellhop on the way out the door. They problem is that in this country, CEOs are only too happy to trade the scorn of the public for a pile of money. We can bitch all we want about golden parachutes that can top $100 million for executives who didn’t do shit except lose shareholder money the entire time they were employed, but that CEO will chuckle to himself, have his flack issue a statement, and then go enjoy his millions and millions of free dollars on a private island somewhere, full of untold numbers of prostitutes.

Wall Street Calamity: Stocks Crushed in Financial Freefall

Stocks are Crushed in Financial Freefall

“Stocks crushed,” is how CNN Money, employing all the descriptive restraint that it could, sees this morning’s disastrous economic landscape. The Dow Jones Industrial Index’ record 777.68 points (7%) drop yesterday was “the biggest one-day point drop in [its] 102-year history,” writes the Wall Street Journal. Washington “lawmakers groping for a resolution…..as they attempt to avoid economic calamity,” writes the New York Times, with all the urgency that two-thirds of the House Republicans and some 40% of the Democrats failed to muster yesterday.

At the same time, the banking industry continues what the Wall Street Journalis calling “a decade’s worth of consolidation in a matter of weeks.” Yesterday it was Citigroup’s turn to swoop in on some distressed financial institution, with its government-brokered takeover of Wachovia’s banking operations for $2.2 billion in an all-stock deal. Wachovia, the nation’s fourth-largest bank, wasn’t on the point of collapse but the government intervention based on its deteriorating condition – and the threat that posed to the teetering U.S. financial system – hammers home how “quickly once-mighty U.S. banks are succumbing to a growing mountain of bad mortgages and other loans,” says the Wall Street Journal.

Clearly, then, the headline from the world of politics and economics for today seems fairly self-evident: in the wake of the House of Representative’s failure to pass a bailout package for Wall Street, the Dow dropped by the largest point margin in any single day in history.

But as Sam Stein points out in The Huffington Post, that number told only half the story. Indeed, much of what transpired on Wall Street and in the halls of politics put a bookend on what now seems to the final – poor – chapter of the Bush administration’s economic record. On Monday, the Dow finished lower than when George W. Bush assumed the presidency: 10,587.59 on January 19, 2001 compared to 10,365.45 at its close on September 29, 2008.